Drag City recording artist and Scotsman Alasdair Roberts' new albumSpoilsis one of the best I've heard all year. It's a lyrically dense, elegant and complex album with trad folk touches. One of its best qualities is its natural ease -- it manages to sound both organic and dense, positively medieval and modern at the same time. Roberts has been creating eloquent, idiosyncratic albums for quite some time, since 1994 to be exact, at first with the band Appendix Out and then simply under his name for the past 8 years. He was rather famously signed to Drag City after handing Will Oldham a tape of his music back in 1995, and his musical career has blossomed on since then. Spoils feels like the culmination of the sound he has cultivated since his first solo album. It is well worth tracking down and listening to repeatedly. My interview with Alasdair follows.

Miss Ess: When and how did you begin writing songs?

Alasdair Roberts: At 15 when I saw footage of the Hindenburg disaster on television and heard the pain in the presenter's voice saying, "Oh, the humanity." I then wrote my first proper song called "Autumn."

AR: Many, many musicians. Some fantastic Romanian buskers in Glasgow city centre today. Fiddle and accordion. I am constantly amazed at how many great musicians there are everywhere who don't receive the credit they deserve. At the moment, Hector MacAndrew. After that I'll listen to Monteverdi. Everything I hear at one turn makes me want to quit and otherwise makes me want to improve my own art and keep going.

Will Oldham heard some four-track recordings and handed them on to the guys who ran Palace Records. They put out the first two songs on the tape -- I front-loaded it so that the hits were first.

What kind of connection do you feel you have with Will Oldham's music? It's like you both are able to mingle aspects of your countries' deep rooted, native sounds with something completely your own...

Maybe some kind of similar attraction to the song form and engagement with singing as a means of "expression." An awareness of what's gone before and an attempt to reconcile that in creating something new. An element of metaphysical and philosophical exploration. Similar straddling of intellect and idiocy.What comes first for you with your songs: music or lyrics? What was your writing process like for Spoils? The songs all seem connected in a beautiful way.

A mixture of both -- I take notes of lyrics all the time which eventually become songs. Guitar parts come separately -- I experiment a lot with different tunings. I'm aware by now that I'll never have the greatest guitar chops, so it's been a concern to try and forge a distinctive guitar style via the use of scordatura, which makes me sound like a better player than I actually am. Half the Spoils songs were written in a crazy summer blurt of activity; then I went on tour and the other half were written afterwards.

Where was your new album recorded? How did you decide on the instrumentation? Do you hear the songs in your head before you record or do you spontaneously bring them together in the studio?

A small analogue studio called Green Door in Glasgow. Great engineers Sam and Emily. Re: instrumentation, I had an idea that the record would be 'syncretic' -- yoking together apparently oppositional belief systems and/or musical approaches, so I brought together musicians from a lot of different backgrounds; all great musicians in their respective fields, all fairly well superior to me instrumentally...

Your songs are clearly influenced by ancient tales/imagery. What first exposed you to mythology? What about it appeals to you?

I don't know; it seems like a fertile area for the generation of ideas; the mythospheres of the world. It's not about escapism or nostalgia, it's more about the way that matters ancient can still have relevance today, and perhaps eternal relevance, although that's probably fanciful.

You are touring with Bert Jansch this summer in the US! Which album of his is your favorite?

I have been listening a lot to his record Avocet recently... beautiful.